Letter 'shows pause on NHS reform is stunt'

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Doctors have been told to press on with NHS reforms despite David Cameron "pausing" legislation to bring in the changes.

Dame Barbara Hakin, the Department of Health's national managing director of commissioning development, has written to GPs urging them to keep up the "momentum" of the reshaping of the NHS.

The day after Health Secretary Andrew Lansley was humiliated by an overwhelming vote of "no confidence" by nurses, Dame Barbara wrote to groups of GPs setting up "pathfinder" consortiums to buy health services.

"Everyone within the Department of Health is very aware of the support shown by the GP community to date and we have been struck by the energy and enthusiasm demonstrated in pathfinders across the country," she said in her letter, which was passed to the Standard. "Therefore, although the Government has taken the opportunity of a natural break in the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, we are very keen that the momentum we have built to date should not stop."

Faced with uproar among nurses and some doctors over the reforms, Mr Lansley said there would be "substantive" changes to the legislation which aimed to allow GPs to take over the £60 billion budget to commission services.

The Prime Minister has signalled that hospital doctors, as well as family doctors, will now have a greater say in the reorganised NHS. But Labour claimed that the letter from Dame Barbara was more evidence that the Government's "listening exercise" was a PR stunt.

Shadow health secretary John Healey said: "It is clear that the health department is planning for the health Bill to go through largely unchanged, and that ministers will carry on regardless of what they hear during the supposed 'pause'."

A Department for Health spokesman said: "The principles remain the same but improvements will be made as we pause, listen and reflect."